An attempt is thus made in this study to Gothicize office fiction so as to broaden the scope of the Gothic. Herein lies why special attention will be given to the office as an idiosyncratic kind of house in office fiction: fiction featuring such characters as clerks, civil servants, and company employees, all of whom are far from what William Hughes refers to as stock characters in the Gothic-“the villainous Gothic Hero, the virtuous hero, and the imperiled heroine” ( 2013, p. To put it another way, the extensive capacity of this genre can be illustrated by unveiling the Gothic nature of the seemingly non-Gothic. If this obsessive focus on the house is found in “some other kinds of stories,” Gothic fiction can certainly expand its realm of representation. Naturally, the house in question is not just any house but a very impressive architectural monument, usually a castle but sometimes a monastery, convent, prison, or insane asylum. But not in gothic fiction, where interior spaces become prisons for imperiled heroines or represent a domestic happiness from which the scarred male protagonist is excluded. In some other kinds of stories, the house is a place of safety, a sanctuary from the world. “Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again” is the famous first sentence of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938). Gothic fiction is a genre obsessively focused on the house. The findings of this study highlight how every sphere of life, including work life, is potentially Gothicized. After all, Gothic fiction is an expanding universe in which the walls come tumbling down between office and house, between work and life, and even between the Gothic and the non-Gothic. Thus, cultivating an environment in which Bartleby’s transnational cousins are rediscovered as Bartlebys lends itself to extending the scope of the Gothic. This focus on work-life issues allows an exploration of another classic office-fiction story about an Asian Bartleby. The discovery of parallels between the protagonists who embody work-life integration stems from incorporating not only elements typical of the Gothic, such as supernatural happenings and closed-room settings, but also other elements, especially work-life balance. These dual settings render each protagonist uncanny and ghostly. The primary emphasis of this study is on the international kinship between Melville’s Bartleby and Kafka’s Samsa: Bartleby’s occupation of the law office turns the place into a house, and Samsa’s transformation into the monstrous vermin turns his apartment into an office. In Gothicizing office fiction, Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall-Street” draws parallels with Franz Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis.” These classics of nongenre fiction have hardly been considered the classics of office fiction. Herein lies why special attention is given to the office as an idiosyncratic kind of house in office fiction: fiction featuring such characters as clerks, civil servants, and company employees. If this obsessive focus on the house is found in other genres of fiction, Gothic fiction can certainly expand its realm of representation namely, the extensive capacity of this genre can be illustrated by unveiling the Gothic nature of the seemingly non-Gothic. Gothic fiction is in essence about the power of place, particularly of house.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |